Illegal Content
Yelp is a review site that connects people with great local businesses, and provides a platform where local businesses can share information about their products and services. Given the nature of Yelp’s services, the risk of illegal content identified by Ofcom on Yelp (and the risk of illegal content in general) is low.
Even though the risk of illegal content is low, consumer trust is one of Yelp’s top priorities. Yelp uses advanced technology and human moderation to protect the integrity and quality of content on our platform.
Yelp’s approach is driven by our automated recommendation software, reporting by Yelp’s community of users and business owners, and moderation efforts focused on investigating content and platform activity. We’ve also developed automated systems to support human moderation in identifying promotional spam, inappropriate photos, and other content that violates Yelp’s Content Guidelines.
Yelp uses large language models (LLMs) as part of its protective measures to better detect reviews that may contain the most egregious instances of hate speech, vulgar language, or threats before they are ever published to Yelp. This system flags potentially inappropriate reviews to our moderators, and the moderator’s decision regarding the flagged content is then used to further train the LLM to more accurately flag potentially problematic content going forward. Since determining whether content is inappropriate can be context specific, we also continue to rely on reports from our community of users.
Yelp also has AI-based systems that are used to detect photos that may violate our Content Guidelines, including by proactively removing suspected inappropriate video content. These systems flag suspicious visual content for our moderators to review before it is published on Yelp.
Yelp constantly evaluates and monitors the performance of these automated systems to improve their accuracy. Users are also able to appeal Yelp’s content and account moderation decisions as described here.
Yelp’s Terms of Service and Content Guidelines prohibit illegal content, and if you believe there is content on Yelp that is illegal on the basis of UK law, including priority illegal content (as that term is defined under the OSA), you can report it using Yelp’s in-product reporting features described here. You can also report that content, and other illegal content, by using this form.
Law enforcement officers and agencies can contact Yelp using this form.
Disputes About User Content and Accounts
Yelp’s Content Guidelines, which are incorporated into Yelp’s Terms of Service, are available here.You can appeal Yelp’s content and account moderation decisions as described here.
Transparency
Information on Yelp’s content moderation activities can be found here and here. Yelp may also periodically share reports regarding Yelp’s moderation activities in the UK.
Point of Contact
Ofcom may contact Yelp regarding the OSA at dataprotection@yelp.com.Information about how others can contact Yelp can be found here.